Yellow, yellow.

The border dies first, lungs snapped shut by that unready breath, mired out of sleep. The trenches have enough time to wail against a redder sky.

Mustard’s speaker blares the one word “Gas!” and even dead asleep the training takes hold and clamps him shut, jacks him upright and pissing. He clamps the yellow pad over his breath and strains through days of cornmeal coffee.

He runs, runs, mouth and eyes choked with yellow, yellow. They run with him, swirling out of the killing fog, pushing desperately downstream. Tocsin of the light guns; the glassmen weave against their current, faces dragged deeper in their sacks, beating back the tide.

He crashes out and grabs the mask Cooper hold out, pulls it down and regurgitates the stale wad of life-guarding piss. Guns, guns; Mustard creeps into the fog on little cat’s feet, crouched low and bent toward justice.

Behind Giallo a sky yellow as lemon drops and buildings broken as rose bushes. The door ahead is filled with water sounds, water smells, rounded as the inside of a spoon and empty as a thought. He peels his fingers away from the jam, counting to ten, watching them bend, pitches forward on stiff legs into the underground river.

Water steals the sounds of pursuit.

He bangs, turns, chokes and beats for the surface, severed from the certainty of down. Water red as the inside of his eyes, crying loud against brick like blood in his cheek. Giallo nightmares of grates, of a stretch without air, of their hungry bone fingers digging into his side. Down and out is still better than back; he perseveres.

Daylight finds him encrusted on the side of the bay. Slick and oily with filth, hair and body nacred with bile. Someone is screaming music against the concrete further down, voice and drums and guitars biting into the air like a chainsaw. He drags himself up, no sound the sweeter, glad for the moment to just be outside.

When he slept under the bridge it was late spring, and the concrete channel was filled with foamy brown water, littered with condoms and fast food wrappers. The ground temperature at night was near freezing, but by the river it wasn’t so bad, especially if you could find someone to bundle with. He slept with women until the word got around, and then he slept with men until the word got around and by that time it was summer and he was safe. After that they all avoided him, men and women both, and he was like one dead, which suited him just fine. On dry days, when the haze wasn’t so bad, he climbed to the top of the highest bridge and looked west along the river to the horizon, at what he didn’t know, unless it was to some vague idea of the invisible sea.

They fell on him in October, ten of them, the largest and hardest, led by Mean Bertha, who wasn’t the beefiest but who’d killed twenty men and rolled their gutted bodies into the river. In a way he was flattered. Nine of them held him down, two on each arm and leg and one to keep his mouth closed, while Mean Bertha cut his clothes off. Underneath he was smooth and hairless and without blemish. Bertha put her knife against the artery in his thigh, near the empty arc of his loins, and growled a word, short and ugly. He bit down on the hand over his mouth until he tasted blood, closed his teeth through the gristle of muscle, and had the satisfaction of hearing the man scream in pain as Bertha flicked the knife into his legs…